Nathan Fielder’s Most Convincing Argument Might Be His New Balances

You can really see everything in You Can See Everything. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s three-hour film about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ final weeks of freedom before she went to prison for defrauding investors is an odyssey. Everything here becomes a euphemism for both the shortcomings and oversights of the central subject, whose credibility is put under the microscope for hours. In a film that invites audiences to play detective alongside Fielder himself, the most curious clue as to who’s the most earnest of them all arrives on foot, literally, in the form of some unmissable New Balance sneakers. The question guiding You Can See Everything is who deserves to be believed, and how one can tailor their performance to what they want to convey to the world. Fielder’s grey New Balances become a visual metaphor for the grey area the movie lives in, namely, the belief in whether or not Holmes knowingly or innocently defrauded the investors in a case that ended in her 11-year prison sentence. The sneakers are like a neutrality clause for the psychological plumbing Fielder does in Holmes’s life. And really, what says “trust me” better than America’s favorite dad shoe? The sneakers in question look to be either the New Balance 992 or 990v6 — I humbly consult sneaker heads who have seen the movie as well to confirm — two iterations of the brand’s famously unassuming grey running shoe. These sneakers have a particular pedigree among tech bros, most famously as part of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ uniform, along with his black turtleneck and jeans. Fielder seems to have taken cues from Jobs’ wardrobe, wearing what appears to be the very same sneaker; Redditors have clocked him wearing grey 990v6s on the latest season of The Rehearsal, as well as at the airport with a fan. Your Highsnobiety privacy settings have blocked this Instagram post.Holmes herself gets in on the New Balance action in a scene where she picks out the outfit she’d like to wear to report to prison: a bright red New Balance shoebox sits on the table, tissue paper shuffled as if it’d just been unboxed. (In news clips from the day Holmes reported to federal prison in Bryan, Texas, she also looks to be wearing a pair of all-white 750s.) When analyzed along with how Fielder stayed in the 992s or 990v6s the entire movie, Holmes’ New Balances almost feel like product placement, though there’s no real reason to assume it is. Fielder is known for his painstakingly constructed productions on shows like The Rehearsal, but this particular detail feels like a happy accident. Your Highsnobiety privacy settings have blocked this Instagram post.After all, Holmes once famously modeled her black-turtleneck uniform after Jobs, borrowing the visual language of Silicon Valley genius to be taken seriously as genius in her own right — as referenced in the movie, it was a look thrust upon her to make people see her differently. And it feels like these New Balances are the latest product tasked with participating in that narrative — not of image rehabilitation per se, but of the full perspective of a human. New Balances are new-start shoes that say, “How could I possibly lie? I’m wearing the most humble sneakers known to man!” Which is…precisely the problem. A film so concerned with the performance of honesty inevitably makes us suspicious of its own documentarian. Look down at shoe-level, and the seemingly monobrand New Balance-iness of it all can feel almost sinister. Holmes’ claims of innocence are contested while her conviction isn’t. The shoes, meanwhile, are so aggressively neutral they can accommodate just about any projection, or audience prediction, while perhaps selling people on some New Balances in the meantime. The genius of the grey New Balance is that it looks like it has nothing to prove, which makes it an awfully convincing thing to wear when you have everything to prove. Highsnobiety has affiliate marketing partnerships, which means we may receive a commission from your purchase. Want to shop the products our editors actually love? Visit our SHOPPER page and subscribe to the newsletter for recs on all things fashion, footwear, and beauty.